abracalc

One book, one family, one copy

Tonight’s story is about them.

Tell us the small things — which stair creaks, what the dog is convinced it is good at, the thing they say every single night — and we will write and illustrate a picture book about your family. It arrives as a PDF, ready to read at bedtime.

  • Your photos are deleted the moment you approve the characters.
  • No account, no email. A code is the only thing you need.
  • Your book is kept 14 days in case you lose it, then deleted.
  1. Family
  2. Photos
  3. Story
  4. Make it

Who is this book for?

Only a name is required. Everything else makes the book better, and the smaller and more specific the detail, the more it sounds like them.

The child

What a photo cannot show us about them

Worth two minutes — this is what makes the drawing look like them. We ask the same about everyone else further down.

Everyone else

The pet

Someone we will have to imagine

A dinosaur, a robot, a friend only they can see — anyone in the story with no photograph. We draw them once, carefully, and then they stay the same on every page.

Your home and your street

Optional — but this is where the magic comes from

  1. Family
  2. Photos
  3. Story
  4. Make it

Now, their faces

Two or three clear, well-lit photos of the child, and one or two of everyone else. Avoid sunglasses, hats, and group shots as the only picture of a person — we need to be able to tell who is who.

Anything else — group shots, or somebody we have not listed

Drop photos here or click to choose

JPG, PNG or WEBP · up to 12 MB each · 20 photos and 50 MB in total

Your photos go to one place other than us: Google's Gemini models, which are the illustrator that draws from them. Nobody looks at them, they are not published, and they are deleted from our server the moment you approve your characters — after that we hold only the drawings. Exactly what happens to your photos.

  1. Family
  2. Photos
  3. Story
  4. Make it

Pick tonight’s story

Each of these is a shape, not a script. It gets rebuilt around your family, so no two copies are the same. We have marked the one that fits what you told us.

The language of the book

The book is written in the language you pick here — written in it, not translated into it. This website and the story descriptions above stay in English for now.

How involved do you want to be?

  1. Family
  2. Photos
  3. Story
  4. Make it

Getting ready

Setting up your book.

remaining

It’s finished.

Download it now — and write this code down before you close the page. It is the only way back to your book.

Your download code ····-····

Download the PDF

Your photos have been deleted. Nothing about your family is kept beyond the book itself, and that goes too on the date above.

Your books

Kept on this device, not on our server — so they are here on this browser and nowhere else. Clearing your site data clears them, and a new phone starts empty.

Your photographs are never stored here. What is kept is the drawing we made from them, along with your answers — which is all a second book needs.

Fetch a book you already made

Enter the download code you were given. Books are kept for 14 days.